http://www.ere.net/2013/02/04/the-end-of-sourcing-is-near-the-remaining-recruiting-challenge-is-selling/
I want to talk to you about part of this article. It makes several good valid points.
- "The time is rapidly approaching were nearly every professional and working individual in the developed world can be found by a recruiting function."
- "With the growth of the Internet, social media, and employee referral programs, finding talent is becoming amazingly easy."
- "In recruiting, we call finding talent “sourcing,” and for nearly three decades sourcing has been the most important but difficult aspect of recruiting."
- "After all, if you can’t find great talent, you certainly can’t interview and hire them."
- "Finding Talent Is Easy Because Everyone Is Now “Visible”"
In many ways what we see in this article is a theme that has been reported for a long time. It is a great deal easier to find talent, but we only see a tiny percentage of people out there. Every time I go to a job fair, I am constantly amazed at how many people are not in any database and not on LinkedIn. In the US alone for example there are about 157,000,000 people working. LinkedIn does a decent job reportedly with 74,000,000 people in the United States. That is a really hard number to wrap my brain around. In the Midwest for example, more than 2/3 of the people I speak with in Manufacturing and Energy Services are working, and not looking. Many of them forget that they even have a profile on the page.
Finding someone is one thing. Finding someone who is looking for work is another thing. A huge part of my role as a Sourcer for my company is finding people that are actively looking for work, but also being able to develop relationships with industry experts to drive referrals, and so that the "candidate" comes to us at some point.
The end is not "NIGH" for recruiting, things are simply as any industry does, changing with the times. The challenge for Sourcers is to develop and become experts at the "ART" of sourcing as opposed to just the "SCIENCE" of recruiting.
The bottom line is that the majority of "Sourcers" I know do not fit into the mold of just finding people. They find, they source, the interview, they refer to jobs. As long as the economy is growing, there will always be a need for sourcers. I do agree with the conjecture the article makes that we as "Sourcers" need to be better salespeople as part of our job, and that there are systems that can be put into place to ease that process. It all to me comes down to good training, and being willing as a company to see the changes in the SCIENCE, and to use that SCIENCE to help refine the ART of sourcing.
<steps off soap box>
Look for my next post next Friday on a new Google Search tactic. S_O_D
